133 Quotes About South

I still sometimes encounter readers from the South who speak to me of the book's impact on them when it first fell into their hands in an Istanbul shantytown, a Greek port, the slums of Madrid, Damascus or Bombay. In these different places the book had an intimate address. It was no longer a sociological (or even political at the first degree) treatise but, rather, a little book of life stories, a sequence of lived moments — such as one finds in a family photo album. [From the Preface]

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

In the South, we knew our adversary would stop at nothing to silence our activism. We knew we could never match his readiness to annihilate our resistance. So we ceded him that ground and challenged him instead to defend himself against the work of loving peace.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

As for reading books, even far-out books, even beatnik books, fine. Only there are not enough books for me down South, which is one reason I came to New York.

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit."If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.